Transport: Needle Work

Alongside a dock hard by Britain's Royal Naval College in fogbound
Dartmouth, the strangest ship in the world is being fitted out this
week for a series of voyages that are to take her, within the next few
years, to many an out-of-the-way corner of the seas. She is the Royal
Research Ship Research, a trim 770-ton brigantine. Chief job of naval
and civilian scientists, to be quartered in her midships, will be to
chart magnetic variations, compare their readings with those taken by
the Carnegie Institution's Carnegie before she blew up while taking on
gasoline in Apia, Samoa, in 1929.